How to Cut Render Times in HALF (for free!) 

Sorry I've been AWOL for a while. I moved into a new office space, and I've been working on some really cool content behind the scenes.

This is very good **for photorealistic scenes** as soon as you diverge from mostly realistic it starts breaking a lot

I love that it IS a clickbaity title, and that it really isn't, as promised! Great stuff this. Will definitely give it a try. Have you done any tests to see how sensitive it is to image resolution? If it's better with lower res or higher res.

I have been thinking a LOT of interpolation for the last year or so. It began when playing Flight simulator on the Xbox. My Samsung TV has a mode where it interpolate frames to get a smoother look. One day when I was playing flight simulator everything was buttery smooth. Like playing the game on a 120hz screen with a matching graphics card. I realised then that I had turned that mode on. Got me thinking. And I then found a free application called Dain and started doing some experiments with it. Mostly for hand drawn animation and Blender. Sometimes it works insanely well. And sometimes it's unusable. I think it's a very interesting path worth exploring. And I am a bit surprised that it hasn't been more of a thing overall. I am not 100% sure but I think that the Xbox feature "frame boost" works in a similar way but in real time. I wished that more applications supported interpolation out of the box.

The main people I would suggest NOT use this are aspiring animators. Frame interpolation has a tendency to change how motion is perceived and can make animations that are dynamic/quick look very smooth. I would say it's even perceptible in this video with the motion of the camera or the character who walks across the frame @3:24 However for non-animators, or anyone who really doesn't want to spend a lot of time tuning things like camera shake or character motion then it can be a big time saver. Of course it can be used intentionally in some cases to smooth out motion, for instance if the camera moves are a bit too quick and jerky a frame interpolator will ease that a bit. Similarly if a character's animation is looking poppy, the "right" way would be to fix the curves, but interpolation could help in a pinch. So the effect can be desirable in some cases.

Thanks for mentioning that this saved 9 hours. As someone who's worked with blender, but never really rendered anything, it can be hard to understand why this matters.

The day you do click bait videos is the day i stop using the internet, it'll never happen!!!

FWIW - on a Mac this trick works too if you have Final Cut Pro. You render at half the frame rate out of Blender, bring it into a FCPX timeline of the correct frame rate. Then you can use Rate Conform - Optical Flow to interpolate the remainder of the frames. It works quite well (although not free for FCPX).

I have tried a few frame interpolation AI apps and I have not found one that works well when a moving object is included behind another object and then reemerges.

Just a small warning using this tech. Blinking is usually just one frame and will brake the animation with interpolation.

Interesting, I hadn't thought of that before.

I've used DAIN for over a year.

First !😀btw I already knew what you are going to do before clicking the video. Awesome technique! though I haven't tried it out yet

I’ve been using it for a few months for animations and it’s been a complete lifesaver. It’s nice to be able to crank up render settings a little higher than they usually go

Was using this for how long now there's different interpolation techniques out there that run good and fast

🤨

Aha! This was a click bait video! You don’t show us how long it took to render one of the original scenes, so I have little to go on here. But 12 frames a second are done, but you need to include in the render time setting up the AI, then you need to check for glitches and fix those. More labor you need to do, and not just wait and see. Patching stuff take a lot of time, I’ve done it to many times. If your frames takes for ever to render, yes this could help. But if it’s an over nighter, not a to long render, and you then need to do a lot of fixing, you’ll maybe save max 25% of time. And if you are also having AOVs, hot damn, this "fixing" can take for ever. Then it’s better to just render the damn sequence as planed. And don’t show people that you are using PNGs, that will also add a lot to your render time. Use exe at least, with dwaa if you don’t need much color control.

This is gonna be great for greasepencil animations. I've always wanted something like this.

Would be great if these algorithms were also able to make use of the motion vector pass which could eliminate some of the errors that you have pointed out in your renders. Does anyone know if FrameFlow is using optical flow?

What about rendering the images at 960x540 and upscaling them 2x in order to get 1920x1080, using Topaz Video AI, for example (cutting render times by 4)? Would it provide a good result?

This download is a no brainer. If this works, I would be happy to support the creator of this app

Frame interpolation doesn't need to use AI, it's been around forever. An old laptop I had had a feature called Trimension DMN that would interpolate frames of the DVD you were watching in real time and it would make an old movie look like a soap opera shot in high def.

Awesome! I knew about this, but I didn't know about Flowframes, I always tried finding some plugin in AfterEffects or Premiere to try it out, but it seems I was mistaken on the software I should use.

I discover interpolation with an other video (with same type of clickbate title x) ) from cgmatter but it regularly gave me glitch result (usually with straight line)

knew about it but haven't used it yet ;)

I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago. Glad to have found your video.

does this affect the separated render path when compositing ???

Good to know this. I am about to start an animation, so this will save some time.

Goddamn the noise threshold! I've never tinkered with that and damn!

great technique, although the title should mention animation, as it doesn't work on still image obviously but the titles suggests that it does

It’s it intentional to have the graphic say 12 on both sides at 2:45?

I thought this would be clickbait or a meme and I was ready to roll my eyes. This is actually super cool.

The videos are glitchy, this method doesn't play good with motion blur. Not production quality definetly.

It would have been helpful if you'd stated that this is NOT available for the Mac. I just donated to the guy and he didn't bother properly specifying either. Really annoying how so many blender users automatically assume everyone uses a PC. Almost as annoying as the assumption that everyone uses a 3 wheel mouse instead of a trackpad. Have these so called Blender experts ever heard of a laptop?

Nice, Thank you for this. Have to give it a go.

Have not used it. I'll take a look!

Thank you for reminding me of this method! I've never needed it as i only rendered single frames, now that I'm featuring into animation, this is a life saver!

Might not work as well if you’re rendering out a multi-pass EXR sequence.

I have used premiere pro's motion interpolation in the past but it is pretty bad in comparison to this ai one. I will definitely try it with this ai version in the future!

Thank youu! =D

Moral of the story: there is still a long time for AI revolution. So, relax.

Thank a lot

Fantastic, I will try this for sure, sounds exactly what I could use right now for animating my rather complex model. Thanks for sharing. Edit: I have an AMD graphics card and my first attempts failed. Need to look closer into this, but it seems very much nVidia oriented, understandable I guess since CUDA is preferable for rendering also in Blender. Ah well, I'll get an nVidia card one of these days, I'm sure.

That is really helpful thanks alot. Also do you know a similar free programme for ai image upskaling. there are some good android apps but I can't find something free for windows.

Any Mac option for the software you use for interpolation?

It’s okay. But like you said it glitchy and it’s so much worse for 2D animation. But after seeing you “demos” I think it really works for more 3D projects.

WOW, this is AMAZING 🙌 Thanks for sharing this ✌️

I knew about this but for some reason never dawned on me to use it in this way. I'm sold!

Ive been using Flowframes for a while now.

Should be good for slow motion simulation

fantástico!!!!!!! Isso vai mudar minha vida!!

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Video title should be a gift from God to 3d artists